Get Set Go

Customers today have the option of interacting with brands through a plethora of channels and they expect a seamless experience. It has become even more critical for companies to acquire the right set of customers at the minimal acquisition cost, engage with them, retain them and maximize their lifetime value. For businesses to be able to achieve this, traditional ways of approaching technology investments do not suffice. Companies need new tools that can help navigate the complex customer journeys.

Let’s look at the suite of products that are required in the MarTech stack. All the tools should be aligned to the overall strategy and the tools should complement each other in aligning the various departments and functions like Marketing, Operations, Sales, Digital, Finance, IT and Analytics.

An ideal MarTech stack has all the appropriate technologies and applications to manage the entire customer lifecycle – attracting the right customers, engaging with them, and retaining them in an efficient and profitable manner. Let us look at some of the key ingredients of a good stack. Many of these tools will be relevant across different stages of the customer lifecycle.

Customer Data Mart

The core challenge in most of the industries is that the data is captured at various touchpoints in their own customized format and it is not possible to standardize the data capture mechanism across different touchpoints. The fields captured and validations happening for various fields are also customized. Customer data mart is a unified

place where data from various customer touchpoints is stored in a clean and consistent format. In most cases, this component will need customized de-duplication processes to identify a unique customer. Customer data mart acts as a foundation for creating a Single Customer View and advanced analytics & reporting needs.

Single Customer View

Single Customer View is a unified view with the capability to give 360-degree perspective of a customer’s behaviour. Any BI and advanced analytics solution is incomplete without having an integrated understanding of a customer across all touchpoints. Customer Single View combines data of a customer from multiple perspectives (Demographic, Transactional, Social Media profile, Campaign responses, Product preferences etc.) Customer Single View should be integrated with all touchpoints to optimize customer experience

Extract, Transform, Load (ETL)

This step is very critical to bring data from multiple sources into one common environment. While some data quality checks are implemented during data collection, remaining checks should ideally be implemented in this stage to ensure clean, consistent and standardized data is made available for consumption.

This step also ensures consistent interpretation of data by various business users.